CHAPTER NINE
Just War without Civilians
WHEN CRITICS OF U.S. PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s inaction in Syria suggest that failing to intervene results in the tragedy that “innocent women and children end up in pools of their own blood” and mix a call to arms, based on the issue of women’s rights, against the Syrian government with the language of just cause in the Just War tradition, the gendered nature of such justifications is not unique, coincidental, or aberrant to the tradition itself.1 Quite the contrary, they echo recent declarations of President Bill Clinton on Kosovo and President George W. Bush on Afghanistan, advocating interventionist policy.2
These interventionist declarations on gender grounds may seem contradictory to many perceptions of the Just War tradition, but I argue that appearance is only surface level. This chapter contends that the Just War tradition has been constructed on, and is fundamentally tied to, the gender tropes that masculinize combatants as (male) “just warriors” and feminize civilians as (female) “beautiful souls,” constituting men as by definition defenders of the innocent and women as by definition innocent and in need of defense.3 I argue that the “noncombatant immunity principle” that identifies combatants and civilians and justifies fighting for civilians’ protection is inseparable from gendered sex role stories about male just warriors and female beautiful souls that legitimate war, fantasize protection, and render actual protection impossible. The “non-combatant” or “civilian” immunity principle in jus in bello doctrine, and in particular its dependence on a gendered feminine notion of the “protected” in war(s), functions not to limit warfighting but to permit war making, in theory and in practice.
This chapter presents that argument and then explores what Just War theories might look like if wars were not fought “for” women, “over” women, attacking women, or “protecting” women. It proposes revising Just War theorizing by putting aside the gendered combatant/civilian dichotomy—that is, by delineating Just War “without civilians.”
GENDER, PERFORMANCE, AND NONCOMBATANT IMMUNITY
The Just War tradition is performative; it is not a pregiven subject or the product of historical evolution, but a “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effect it names.”4 In this understanding, Just War theorizing cannot be reduced to or understood in its written evolution. Rather, Just War theorizing is expressive and constituted by utterances of Just War tenets. Just War theorizing is not something “out there” that is deployed in particular political situations; instead, it is “constituted by its employment, its deployment, and its manifestations in practice.”5 This approach makes it possible to understand war as a product of Just War narratives and Just War narratives as a coconstituted product of war(s).
Taking Just War theorizing as performative, this section focuses on a discussion of gendered performances of the noncombatant immunity principle. Looking through “gendered lenses” in order to “trace out the ways in which gender is central to understanding international processes,” this chapter looks to uncover the assumptions about and perceived associations with gender that are necessary to make just war theorizing in its current constitution meaningful.6
Feminist work on the practice of gender in the noncombatant immunity principle has engaged in critically interrogating the gendered symbolic meanings of the combatant/civilian distinction. In this research program, feminists have inquired into the traits assigned to the ideal-typical “combatant” and his foil, the ideal-typical “civilian,” in Just War narratives about combatants whose fighting serves to protect civilians. This work has identified the idea-typical combatant as a masculinized “just warrior,”7 a figure who fights in wars not for a desire to engage in brutality but out of a responsibility to provide protection. That responsibility to provide protection is linked to the just warriors’ masculinity, where provision of protection is linked to honor and full citizenship, but failure to provide protection results in shaming and emasculation.8
The just warrior’s constitution as a provider of protection, however, requires the constitution of the ideal-typical civilian to be protected. If the just warrior’s masculinity is affirmed and honor bestowed by providing protection, the question of who is being protected is key.9 Feminist work has identified the idealized civilian as a feminized “beautiful soul,”10 a figure whose defining characteristic is her innocence and need of protection from the evils of the enemy. Though the beautiful soul does not engage in warfighting, war cannot be fought without her, because her protection is required by the noncombatant immunity principle and is a key part of the state’s ability to justify not only its war effort but also its existence.11 This reaches into jus ad bellum Just War principles.
JUS AD BELLUM AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PROTECTION
The gendered “beautiful soul” reaches into jus ad bellum Just War principles because of the double role in which the gendered logic of the immunity principle casts her.12 The “beautiful soul” is the civilian who needs to be separated from combatants and, once separated, granted immunity. That very need for distinction and immunity, however, also casts her as the just warrior’s “other” who must be protected at all costs in order for a war to be just or justified. Whether that “beautiful soul” is Helen of Troy or Jessica Lynch, her innocence and need for protection or rescue serves as a rallying cry for fighting and winning wars.
The gendered ideal-typical civilian, then, legitimates not only particular warfighting tactics, but war making more generally. The war-justificatory logic in the role of the beautiful soul is both found in and fundamental to the Just War tradition’s civilian immunity principle. The call to arms inherent in the need to protect the beautiful soul constitutes (and is constituted by) gendered notions of what a state or nation is and the gendered nationalisms that arise out of those conceptions of state or nation.
This is the case because women beautiful souls serve as reproducers of states or nations symbolically, culturally, and even biologically, both in the gendered noncombatant immunity principle and more generally.13 This role of women in gendered nationalisms means that “women’s bodies, relations, and roles become the battleground for different idealized versions of the past and constructions of the nationalist project for the future.”14
As such, there is violence committed in the name of protecting the beautiful soul from violence, where “nationalism is naturalized, and legitimated, through gender discourses that naturalized the domination of one group over another through the disparagement of the feminine.”15 The noncombatant immunity principle, then, even though it seems like an optimal tool to protect its ideal-typical civilian “beautiful soul,” not only legitimates fighting but also exposes the very object of its “protection” to vulnerability.16 In fact, recent work has argued that there is a link between the logic of the noncombatant immunity principle and the harms of intentional civilian victimization.
GENDER AND INTENTIONAL CIVILIAN VICTIMIZATION
If the “beautiful soul” serves to motivate the ideal-typical combatant’s benevolent service and to justify a state’s war effort, adversarial parties in war are aware of the symbolic role that they play. The enemy’s knowledge of the symbolic role of the beautiful soul affects which wars are fought and how warfighting is planned and executed. Since Carl von Clausewitz,17 strategists have instructed that belligerents interested in victory should identify their enemy’s “center of gravity” and destroy that. A “center of gravity” is a target with a combination of physical and symbolic value to a belligerent, where destroying it will handicap the opponent’s ability to fight but do the most damage to the opponent’s willingness to fight. In terms of the beautiful soul trope, therefore, “it follows that a group’s desire to ‘protect’ their women motivates them to attack the women seen as belonging to the ‘enemy.’”18 In other words, “the principle of civilian immunity, then, paradoxically but still really, carried to its logical end, makes it strategically beneficial to attack (enemy) civilians intentionally and in large numbers.”19
In fact, states that are militarily capable of mounting attacks on civilians do so in 35 percent of their interstate wars and more frequently in intrastate conflicts.20 Recent feminist work has suggested that belligerents’ engagement in intentional civilian victimization is actually attacking “civilians” as a proxy for the feminized “beautiful soul” trope, a motivation rooted in the noncombatant immunity principle.21
This realization is relatively recent. While feminist work has long explored the gendered dimensions of some attacks on civilians during war (such as rape), the idea that intentional civilian victimization writ large is gendered is still developing. Queues on how to theorize gendered intentional civilian victimization can be taken from feminist analysis of war rape, especially given that feminists have recognized war rape as a symbolic and communicative message of disparaging the enemy, where there is a “long history of associating actual women’s rape with national, communal, and male dishonor.”22 Particularly, feminist work has framed the debate by characterizing raping women as attacking the “enemy” nation in two different ways. First, war rape attacks men’s virility (and therefore their protective ability). Second, war rape attacks women as states’ or nations’ “center of gravity.” My recent work argues that intentional civilian victimization as a whole functions along those same two axes, targeting the feminized, symbolic “beautiful soul” as a way to target the just warrior’s willingness to fight. In this way, intentional civilian victimization can be seen as a gendered product of the gender tropes necessary to give the civilian immunity principle meaning.
THE GENDERED LOGIC OF THE IMMUNITY PRINCIPLE AS LEGITIMATING WAR AD BELLUM
This logic implies that belligerents attack the (women) civilians seen as belonging to their enemies for the same reasons that they protect the (women) civilians that they see as their own—because the noncombatant immunity principle serves to legitimate (apparently protective) violence in war(s). It at once licenses states to make war(s) given the protective mandate of jus ad bellum just cause logic and provides them with the logical path to total defeat of their enemies by depriving them of their casus belli, their own “beautiful souls.”
I argue that this negative effect of the gendered noncombatant immunity principle has become a necessary part of contemporary performances of Just War theorizing, particularly to Just Cause claims. In this way, the noncombatant immunity principle can be seen to have three functions: first, it serves the traditionally understood function of limiting in bello conduct and behavior; second, and equally important, it serves as a permissive ad bellum to motivate violence in the name of protection; third, and least examined so far in the literature, it serves as a logic to motivate its direct violation. In other words, the noncombatant immunity principle is internally contradictory. It is crucial both to the protection of civilians and to attacks on civilians.
While all rules in some sense serve to tease “rebels” who see them as meant to be broken, the paradox of the noncombatant immunity principle is that the internal logic of the rule is key both to “good guy” justificatory logics of Just War but also to “bad guy” strategic logics of civilian victimization, where “civilian” is a proxy for “beautiful soul,” much like “beautiful soul” is a proxy for “civilian” in first-order interpretations of the immunity principle.23
I argue that Just War theorizing’s limiting and permissive functions then need to be weighed against each other, deontologically and practically. Deontologically, a principle that serves to motivate its own intentional violation is unsustainable. In practice, if the immunity principle’s gendered tropes motivate not only in bello intentional civilian victimization but also ad bellum violent choices, the scales also tip against continuing to rely on a Just War approach that includes the civilian immunity principle (and its gendered performances). In this way, Just War theorizing can be seen as permissive, encouraging, supportive, and complicit in war(s).
The gendered intentional civilian victimization that the immunity principle motivates is effective because, according to V. Spike Peterson, “implicit in the patriarchal metaphor is a tacit agreement that men who cannot defend their woman/nation have lost their ‘claim’ to that body, to that land.”24 The attacks on (civilian) women work because they betray the failed masculinity of the “just warriors” tasked to protect the violated women, and belligerents wage such attacks (while defending their own women) in order to gain an edge vis-à-vis their opponents.
This incentive to attack civilians, and the resulting permissiveness of Just War theorizing, is reason for concern that Just War performances may be net harmful, especially given how salient Just War theorizing is in war-justificatory discourses in the policy world, especially among the policy elite in great powers. In other words, Just War theorizing is limiting in bello so much as it demands civilians be distinguished and protected, but it is permissive in that the protection of a belligerent’s civilians serves to motivate belligerents to fight wars, and warfighting creates an incentive to attack opponents’ civilians, given their (gendered) special place in Just War narratives and performances. The “beautiful soul” as a feminized, innocent other to the virile “just warrior” (and the resultant links between the ability to protect and virility) institutionalizes her protection as a “just cause” in performance if not in Just War’s textually articulated standards. As such, while the civilian immunity principle is textually in bello limiting, it is performatively permissive both ad bellum and in bello.
THE INSEPARABILITY OF GENDER HIERARCHY AND THE JUST WAR TRADITION
I argue that the gendered tropes associated with the civilian immunity principle are not coincidental to or separable from its fundamental construction, layered on top of a gender-neutral, potentially effective immunity principle that is a part of a fixable Just War tradition. Instead, I argue, the permissiveness of the immunity principle (and therefore Just War theorizing) cannot be repaired within the existing boundaries of the Just War theorizing.
Just War performances currently are not just (or even mainly) the texts of Just War theorists. Instead, they are “as much manifested in pictures, images, and signifying words and phrases in the claims and speeches of political and military leaders” as in traditional just war texts.25 Those pictures, images, and speeches feature prominently claims to protection of “the innocent,” “the homeland,” “our way of life,” and even, explicitly, “women and children.” Despite the apparent disappearance of other forms of gender inequality in war(s), the use of those tropes is increasingly prevalent, much like the intentional killing of civilian (women) in warfighting tactics. As I have argued before, “this is because just war narratives rely on the existence of a feminized Other, who plays the double role (and lives the double life) of ‘protected’ and casus belli. It is possible that this paradox is inherent in the idea of discriminating between combatants and non-combatants.”26
This possibility would throw a wrench in feminist attempts to degender the Just War tradition and correct the gender stereotypes associated with the civilian immunity principle through reformulation. Feminist work to that end has looked to increase the recognition that men are often civilians and women are often combatants, arguing that evidence of those unexpected roles should complicate the just warrior/beautiful soul dichotomy.27 Other feminist work has argued that masculinity should not be key to validation, and the ability to protect (by killing) should not be key to masculinity.28 This work, which tries to deconstruct the immunity principle’s gendered tropes of protection, is important but addresses the inefficiencies of the implementation of noncombatant immunity rather than the ways it is utilized as in bello and ad bellum permissiveness.
It also does not address the possibility that the gender tropes of just warrior and beautiful soul actually constitute the noncombatant immunity principle. Just War theorists have shown that it is often difficult to separate combatants and civilians in practice, even when there is ethical agreement on the need to do so.29 Yet such a separation is essential to the noncombatant immunity principle, given that it cannot b implemented without knowledge of who to protect and who to target.30
The actual ability to distinguish between protector and protected in practice is then replaced with metaphors, shortcuts, visual identifications, and discursive cues. This makes the combatant/civilian dichotomy functional both among policymakers and among soldiers fighting wars.31 The gendered tropes of just warrior and beautiful soul are those shortcuts that sustain the immunity principle, identifying “womenandchildren” as civilians in need of protection and burdening just warriors with their protection.32 These tropes translate and simplify the noncombatant immunity principle, making it not only intelligible but functional in war practice, and therefore constituting it as an enduring principle of warfighting.33
To deal with that problem, my previous work has attempted to rescue the civilian immunity principle by introducing enforceable rules about who can be injured or killed in bello and who cannot. It has looked to formulate an ad bellum principle of “empathetic warfighting” or a “responsibility-for” approach,34 supplementing the ad bellum proportionality principle. In short, my previous work has tried to limit both warfighting and targeting on the basis of responsibility, suggesting that “belligerents must attempt to understand the composition and political commitments of the people in the opposing society, [and] they must evaluate these commitments with an eye towards an empathetic understanding of opposing positions.”35 This “pays attention to the impacts of in bello decision-making on real people’s lives, both short- and long-term.”36 Such an understanding addresses a segment of the issue. Rather than suggesting that avoiding civilians is the responsibility of those doing the targeting, it suggests that policymakers deciding whether or not to make a war are responsible to anticipate the result of targeting and makes protecting civilians primary to attacking combatants.
That corrective is insufficient, though. While it does prioritize the innocent over the guilty, it is still fundamentally reliant on the combatant/civilian dichotomy, which I argue is untenable. The alternative, then, becomes thinking about what Just War theorizing would look like without the combatant/civilian dichotomy.
Still, “just war without civilians” is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, because “civilians to protect from war form part of the authority of just war discourses.”37 The jus ad bellum moral mandate of just cause relies on identifying some people as guilty of or complicit in the just cause that a belligerent has against its enemy. Without guilty people to target and innocent people to protect, war justification becomes much more difficult. In other words, without “civilians,” there are no “combatants.” Yet, ironically, with “civilians,” there are no civilians. For these reasons, the task of either reformulating the civilian immunity principle or seeing Just War without civilians seems daunting, both in theory and in practice.
JUST WAR WITHOUT CIVILIANS
If the purpose of just war theorizing is to serve as a moderating influence in war making and warfighting, and despite that intent, it functions as a permissive force in war making and warfighting, then part or all of it needs to be supplanted to fulfill the intent of those who see the ethical importance of moderating the making and fighting of wars.
An easy answer might be turning to pacifism, but that rejects war rather than looking to moderate it. Such an answer suggests (I believe inappropriately) that there is no injustice more terrible than the least unjust war that could be imagined to combat the injustice. But imagining war without Just War seems equally, if not more, problematic. Clausewitz suggested discarding war ethics in favor of war making unrestricted by morality.38 An amoral position on war does not recognize the need for moderation or justice, yet such a need seems clearly pressing in the face of the brutality of unmoderated war(s).
A harder answer, but one worth pursuing in my mind, is thinking about war ethics without the civilian/combatant dichotomy. If such an idea is workable, it would also eschew the us/them and public/private separations in war decision making, changing the ethical subjects and objects of Just War theorizing. Such an ethics of war would need to find a justification for fighting outside of the innocence of the beautiful soul and would need to motivate fighting outside of the masculine obligations of and honor sought by just warriors.
Instead, an ethics of war without civilians is one without us/them and public/private dichotomies, fundamentally altering the “us” that might decide, ontologically, to make wars and act to fight them. It is an ethics of war that needs an alternative justification for war than those who it cannot and will not be able to protect. Perhaps it starts at deconstructing dichotomous understandings of us/them as a way to deconstruct or a result of deconstructing the combatant/civilian dichotomy; “we” are inseparable from “them”—linked to, relationally dependent on, relationally constructed “with” “them,” therefore targeting is not unidirectional. Such a war ethics might start at interdependence and intersubjectivity, basing its dictates on a communicative approach to war decision making. In this way, it might be possible to avoid or correct for the net public harm the Just War performances are or have become.39
After all, human rights and civilian protection discourses often “circumscribe women and men within their stylized gender roles” and “legitimate the use of force.”40 Often, discourses of civilian protection and civilian immunity go hand in hand to create and reinforce a “distinction between a civilized us and a barbaric enemy other [which] not only reenacts and reinforces racist colonial stereotypes but works to erase the violence … conducted in the name of [the] ‘humanitarian.’”41 As I have argued, this makes distinction between combatant and civilian ultimately untenable.42
If the distinction between combatant and civilian is ultimately untenable, what might a concept of Just War be like without that distinction? Feminist ontologies provide some hints for how to begin to reconstruct Just War theorizing. As Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True explain: “Feminist ontologies that expand our notions of world politics to include the personal and previously invisible spheres, and that start from the perspective that subjects are relational (rather than autonomous) … demand self-reflexive methodologies.”43 There are two crucial elements here. First, an approach to world politics reliant on feminist ontologies will deconstruct the dichotomy between public and private (especially as it is inherent in the civilian immunity principle) and use self-reflexive methodologies to deconstruct (and then reconstruct) its subject (here, just war theorizing).
If subjects are relational (and therefore relationally autonomous),44 the jus in bello content of Just War theorizing cannot be based on which individuals and which bodies can be targeted without the context of their relations and relationships with others. Instead, thinking about people as autonomous subjects (“the soldier” who attacks and protects “the civilian” who has no agency in that protection but is entitled to it or its performance) is a counterproductive direction for theorizing or planning warfighting. The current civilian immunity principle, and Just War’s tenets that deal with the need to injure civilians (double effect and supreme emergency),45 rely on figuring out which (discrete) individuals fit in which (discrete) categories, then assigning entitlements to them on that basis, then assigning responsibilities to combatants on the basis of civilians’ entitlements.
Instead, a Just War without civilians would base the jus in bello treatment of people (relationally rather than individually) on the basis of their relationships—both to each other and to the cause for which the war is being fought. As Robin May Schott suggests, in times of war, “it would be better for a political community to critically examine its identity and the outsiders that its identity creates than to reassert the validity of its identity through force.”46 This suggests that the jus in bello content of a Just War theory without civilians would start with critical self-examination not only of the grievance or just cause but also of the people who are responsible for the just cause, and that Just War fighting would be based on the relationship of the targets to the targeters and the cause, taking account of complexity and context. Such an approach would make many more categorizations than “combatant” and “civilian” imaginable and would allow both theorists and practitioners to think about degrees of relationship and degrees of separation between not only belligerents but the people who constitute the states or ethnic groups “at war,” with their constituent similarities and differences.
In addition to thinking about people differently, an account of Just War without civilians would need a new mechanism for recognizing participation and suffering in the making and fighting of wars and a new plan for accountability, accounting, and reevaluating in bello choices and results. In her evaluation of Just War theorizing, Schott offers such a mechanism, suggesting “witness” as a mechanism for recognizing the narrative nature of both strategic and tactical war-justificatory accounts.47 She explains, citing Agamben, that “the word witness derives from the Greek word martis, the martyr, which derives itself from the verb meaning to remember.”48 According to Schott, “an ethical discourse of war that gives weight to witness … generates a discourse of war based on their experience of war, not abstracted from experience.”49 An experience-based account moves away from abstracting “civilians” to numbers, symbols,50 and significations, and instead it conceptualizes victimhood in war(s) as lived experience—which forces humanization and corrects the artificial removal of emotion from ethical and strategic discussions of wartime targeting. As Schott explains, “the discourse of witness also make evident that there are many more complex positions in war than the position of warrior or the victim” and “gives weight to the pain of individuals and communities.”51 Witnesses—“soldiers,” “civilians,” “politicians,” and “people”—in a multiplicity of positions, individually and collectively, vis-à-vis the just cause of the war and the fighting of the conflict, can witness an experiential account of not only the relational ethics of targeting but also the results of ethical calculations and decisions as relate to weaponry, chosen targets, level of force, and tactics used.
Such an experience-based notion of jus in bello ethics could (and should, in my opinion) build off of Christine Sylvester’s analysis of sense and war.52 Sylvester encourages us to think about “what security feels like and does not feel like” as a way to understand war experiences and their consequences.53 Sylvester suggests that there is a “war sense” and a “security sense” that people experience as they make, fight, engage with, and respond to war(s).54 I suggest that understanding witnesses’ war senses, and their relationships, might be a more fruitful direction for jus in bello ethics and a foundation for Just War without civilians.
If the noncombatant immunity principle is inescapably gendered, and its genderings a necessary element of both the principle itself and the Just War tradition that it anchors, then the Just War tradition as a whole is permissive and encourages violence. The permissive ad bellum and in bello implications of the gendered immunity principle serve to legitimate gendered war making and incentivize gendered intentional civilian victimization. If that is the case (and fundamental to contemporary Just War performances), then the Just War tradition itself is also a net negative until it is separated from the combatant/civilian dichotomy. This chapter suggests a rough outline of “Just War without civilians,” based on relationships, experience, and witness.
Notes
1. See discussions in Laura Sjoberg, “The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2006): 889–910; Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (New York: Lexington Books, 2006); and recent discussion of the parallels to the Obama Administration in Laura Sjoberg, “‘Manning Up’ and Making (the Libyan) War,” March 23, 2011, blog post at the Duck of Minerva (http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2011/03/manning-up-and-making-libyan-war.html). The quote comes from Eric Golub’s article in the Washington Times, “Syria, the Family Research Council, and Obama’s Silence,” August 16, 2012, at http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/tygrrrr-express/2012/aug/15/syria-family-research-council-and-obamas-silence/(accessed August 18, 2012).
2. Regarding Kosovo, see “Transcript: Clinton Justifies U.S. Involvement in Kosovo,” CNN, May 13, 1999, http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/13/clinton.kosovo/transcript.html (accessed August 18, 2012). Regarding Afghanistan, see George W. Bush’s June 1, 2002, graduation speech at West Point Military academy, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=916 (accessed August 18, 2012).
3. For the original articulation of this idea, see Jean Elshtain, “On Beautiful Souls, Just Warriors, and Feminist Consciousness,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 3–4 (1982): 341–48. For contemporary readings, see Kimberly Hutchings, “Feminist Ethics and Political Violence,” International Politics 44, no. 1 (2007): 90–106; Helen M. Kinsella, “Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War,” Political Theory 34, no. 2 (2006): 161–91; Judith Gardam, “Gender and Non-combatant Immunity,” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 3 (1993): 345–70; Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq.
4. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Psychology Press, 1997); as relates to international security law and ethics, see Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence, and Security: Discourse as Practice (London: Zed Books, 2008). The quote comes from Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’” in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds.) Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Cynthia Weber, “Performative States,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 1: 77–95.
5. Laura Sjoberg, “The Inseparability of Gender Hierarchy, the Just War Tradition, and Authorizing War,” in Just War: A State of the Art, ed. Cian O’Driscoll and Anthony Lange (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, forthcoming 2013). For other discussions of performative constitution in IR see Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Laura Shepherd, Gender, Violence, and Security; Laura Shepherd, ed. Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010); Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
6. V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992; 2nd ed., 1999). More recently, see Marysia Zalewski, “Feminist International Relations: Making Sense … ,” in Shepherd, Gender Matters in Global Politics, 28. Lauren Wilcox, “Gendering the Cult of the Offensive,” Security Studies 18, no. 2 (2009): 214–40 suggests that feminist analysis “ask what assumptions about gender (and race, class, nationality, and sexuality) are necessary to make particular statements, policies, and actions meaningful.” This serves as methodological guidance for this chapter.
7. Elshtain, “Just Warriors, Beautiful Souls.”
8. Nancy Huston, “Tales of War and Tears of Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 3–4 (1982): 271–82; Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Judith Stiehm, ed., Women and Men’s Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1983). R. W. Connell, Masculinities (London: Polity, 1995); Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq.
9. The feminist term for this has been the “protection racket,” since masculine identity is based in protective ability and protective claims rather than actual protection. See Sue Rae Peterson, “Coercion and Rape: The State as a Male Protection Racket,” in Feminism and Philosophy, ed. Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1977).
10. Elshtain, “Just Warriors, Beautiful Souls,” using the Nietzchian “beautiful soul.”
11. Brent Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State (London: Routledge, 2008). See also Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (2006): 341–70.
12. See Laura Sjoberg and Jessica Peet, “A(nother) Dark Side of the Protection Racket,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 2 (2011): 162–81.
13. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), 2.
14. Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 193. Ruth Seifert has described the effect as women’s bodies becoming a “second front” for conflicts (see “The Second Front: The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars,” Women’s Studies International Forum 19, no. 1/2 (1996): 35–43.
15. V. Spike Peterson, “Sexing Political Identity/Nationalism as Heterosexism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 1 (1999): 34–65.
16. Cited in Cindy S. Snyder, Wesley J. Gabbard, J. Dean May, and Nihada Zulcic, “On the Battleground of Women’s Bodies: Mass Rape in Bosnia Herzgovina,” Affilia 21, no. 2 (2006): 190.
17. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 2009; originally published in 1832 as Vom Kriege).
18. Sjoberg and Peet, “A(nother) Dark Side,” 169.
19. Sjoberg, “Inseparability of Gender Hierarchy.”
20. Alexander Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Alexander Downes, “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Causes of Civilian Victimization in War,” International Security 30, no. 4 (2006): 152–95.
21. See Sjoberg and Peet, “A(nother) Dark Side,” and Laura Sjoberg and Jessica Peet, “Targeting Women in Wars: Feminist Contributions,” in Feminism and International Relations: Conversations about the Past, Present, and Future, ed. J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg (London: Routledge, 2011).
22. Pettman, Worlding Women, 191.
23. The “good guy” and “bad guy” logics here are references to Nancy Huston’s “Tales of War and Tears of Women”
24. Peterson, “Sexing Political Identity/Nationalism,” 48.
25. Sjoberg, “Inseparability of Gender Hierarchy.”
26. Ibid.
27. See, e.g., Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007) and other work on women’s participation in combat, terrorism, and other forms of political violence. See, e.g., Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg, “The Duty to Protect: Gender in the Swedish Practice of Conscription,” Cooperation and Conflict 36, no. 2 (2001): 153–76.
28. See, e.g., Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
29. George R. Mavrodes, “Conventions and the Morality of War,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, no. 2 (1975): 117–31 (121).
30. Richard Shelly Hartigan, The Forgotten Victim: A History of the Civilian (Chicago: Precedent, 1982), 7.
31. See, e.g., arguments made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). These books share the argument that people use particular (metaphorical, visual, or analogic) shorthands to make accessible complicated concepts and situations.
32. The term “womenandchildren” comes from Cynthia Enloe, “Womenandchildren: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Village Voice, September 25, 1990; discussed in detail in Helen Kinsella, The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011). R. Charli Carpenter, Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
33. Kinsella, Image before the Weapon; Judith Gardam, “Gender and Non-combatant Immunity,” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 3 (1993): 345–70.
34. See Sjoberg, Gender, Justice; and Sjoberg, “Gendered Realities.”
35. Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, 102.
36. Ibid.
37. Sjoberg, “Inseparability of Gender Hierarchy.”
38. See Clausewitz, On War.
39. Use here borrowed from Hayward R. Alker’s Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for a discussion of conflict as communication, borrowing heavily from Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1981).
40. Margaret Denike, “The Human Rights of Others: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and ‘Just Causes’ for the ‘War on Terror,’” Hypatia 23, no. 2 (2008): 95–121; citing Anne Or-ford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
41. Denike, “Human Rights of Others.”
42. Sjoberg, “Inseparability of Gender Hierarchy.”
43. Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds. Feminist Methodologies in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7.
44. See, e.g., Nancy Hirschmann, “Freedom, Recognition, and Obligation: A Feminist Approach to Political Theory,” The American Political Science Review 83, no. 4: 1227–44.
45. See, e.g., Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars.
46. Schott, “Just War and the Problem of Evil,” 133.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., citing Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 26–28.
49. Schott, “Just War and the Problem of Evil,” 133.
50. For accounts abstracting to numbers see, e.g., Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (1987): 687–718; Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). For accounts abstracting to symbols see, e.g., Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2003): 1–25; Sjoberg and Peet, “A(nother) Dark Side.”
51. Schott, “Just War and the Problem of Evil,” 133–34.
52. Christine Sylvester, “War, Sense, and Security,” in Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Laura Sjoberg (New York: Routledge, 2010).
53. Ibid., 26.
54. Ibid.